I Hate Comcast

Three years ago this month Comcast instituted bandwidth caps for all of their consumer customers. They did this because we uppity consumers got mad over their apparent throttling of speeds and the median use was 4-6 gigs a month. They still claim that to be true but is it?

Since then we do more HD video calls. More Netflix streaming. More Hulu Plus. More cloud storage for backup. More internet everything. But yet, our caps are still 250 gigs a month. It seems a lot but it isn’t at all.

One hour of video Skype equals 1GB. One two hour HD movie on Netflix is 3.6GB. One hour of Hulu Plus is about 500MBs. If you do those things in one night they you’ve already hit Comcast’s so called typical usage.

I don’t know about you but I do most of those things daily and it sucks. They said they would increase it over time but I’ve seen no movement on that front. The caps are in place for anti–completive reason and they know it. It isn’t about network management as the typical cost to the ISP is 2¢ per GIG. Which if you use your entire allotment is 5 dollars a month. I pay 50 bucks a month for access (and I have a special deal). That is a pretty large markup wouldn’t you say?

So just remember as we move more and more of our digital life into the cloud via iOS 5 or Ice Cream Sandwich or whatever that your internet service provider believes your usage of the internet should be the same as it was in 2007.